LONDON — It was awful to watch. Paula Findlay gulping down tears, her face melting into a mask of pain and humiliation, trying to finish last. Her legs were dead, she said. She didn’t know why, but they were dead, and she forced herself to finish the Olympic triathlon, because that was all she had left. So she ran and wept and screamed inside, and she finished the race. She said she was sorry.

Sunday, Simon Whitfield stepped forward to support his teammate and friend, and to level accusations. Canada’s greatest triathlete came to the defence of the 23-year-old Findlay, saying her hip injury and training program were mismanaged over the past year by her former coach, Patrick Kelly; David Smith, a physiologist at the University of Calgary; and Debbie Muir, a high-performance adviser with Own The Podium.

“It was completely mismanaged,” he told reporters Sunday morning in London, two days before his final Olympic race. “I’m not saying people should be fired. I’m just saying they should stand up and say ‘that’s on me.’ Because it was all on Paula yesterday. We all saw it.”

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Whitfield contended Findlay, the Edmonton native who has struggled with a hip injury for a year after winning several World Cups, was rushed back into training over and over, with no thought of changing the program to suit her injury. He said Findlay, whom he considered something akin to a younger sister, was simply pushed back into the same level of work, and it did not allow her to properly train.

“She’s not a wind-up toy that you just send off,” Whitfield told reporters, according to Yahoo’s Nick Cotsonika. “That’s what they wanted. ‘Wind-up toy, send you off. You win. We all celebrate.’ That’s what they did two years ago, and they’re like, ‘Why doesn’t this keep working? Just wind this thing up and send it off.’ And when it broke, they said, ‘She’s difficult. She’s really hard to work with.’ She’s the same person you celebrated two years ago. This is difficult. Too bad.”

Jean Levac/Postmedia Olympic Team

Two sources familiar with Findlay’s training regimen confirm that. One said that Kelly treated Findlay’s hip “like a cold — something that she would get over with no consequence.” When Findlay’s hip flared up, the sources say, Kelly would rest her until the pain subsided, then resume training as if nothing had happened. One source said Kelly simply did not listen to Findlay, and that he was too invested in the hope of training an Olympic medallist, and that Smith sided with Kelly when called upon.

Muir, at Own The Podium, apparently approved Findlay’s funding based on the plan submitted by Kelly. And sources say Findlay lost her enthusiasm for the sport as a result, despite five major International Triathlon Union wins since 2010 and three straight ITU events at the beginning of 2011 that pushed her to No. 1 in the world.

Findlay split with Kelly six weeks before the Olympics, switching to Whitfield’s coach, former Olympic marathoner Jon Brown. Whitfield further alleged that Smith sided with Kelly, and according to Yahoo and The Canadian Press, that Kelly and Smith actively attempted to sabotage Findlay with “fraudulent fitness tests and comments that were not helpful.” He also believes Own The Podium failed to adequately question the plan for Findlay, although it is unclear how much familiarity Muir, a renowned synchronized swimming coach, had with the injury.

Smith and Muir did not return emails to accounts at the University of Calgary and Own The Podium, respectively; Kelly did not return phone calls.

Jean Levac/Postmedia Olympic Team

But if this is true, then they should apologize, to Findlay and to Canada. Findlay was a broken young woman when she crossed that line, last in an event she once hoped to win; she told reporters that she felt awful for her friends and family, saying “They came to watch me, and I wish I could have made them more proud than that. I just want to apologize. I feel terrible. I’m really sorry to everybody. To Canada.” She is 23. She had to die on the stage.

She did not need to apologize. She gave what she had, through bewildering pain and embarrassment. But nobody gets here alone. Someone told Findlay not to undergo surgery, and someone prepared her in a way that caused her to fall almost all the way apart when it mattered. We don’t have enough potentially elite athletes in Canada for people to screw them up; we don’t have a highly developed enough system for it not to be questioned. Paula Findlay’s body failed her at these Olympics. Her heart did not. She had to run alone, suffer alone. Perhaps someone should join her.

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